IndiaAI’s 26bn-parameter EKA-1 is ‘open’, but access is by waitlist
What the IndiaAI Mission released on 3 November (Soket’s EKA-1, ZenteiQ’s Dhīr 2B and 5B), what a new user can get on 5 November, and the 12-model plan behind them.
EKA-1, the 26.3-billion-parameter model the IndiaAI Mission released in New Delhi on 3 November, carries the Apache 2.0 licence on its government listing, and the same listing is marked “Restricted”.12 Its maker, Soket AI, offers it through a waitlist: “Our team reads each request and approves access.”3 The Mission released ZenteiQ’s Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B the same day; their listings are Apache 2.0 and “Restricted” too.15
EKA-1's licence is open; getting the model runs through registration, a waitlist and an approval
EKA-1 as announced and as offered to a new user, 3 to 5 November 2026
Announced on 3 November
- 26.3bn parameters, trained on about 7.5trn tokens; an “open, sparse hybrid language model”
- Apache 2.0 licence on AIKosh, the Mission’s model platform
- Languages: 22 scheduled Indian languages and English (PIB); “more than 100” (AIKosh); “60+” (Soket)
- For maths, code, reasoning and agents, with a 64K-token context
Available to a new user on 5 November
- Listing marked “Restricted”; previewing its 30.49 GB of files needs registration
- A waitlist on Soket’s site, each request read and approved by its team
- The form asks consent for Soket to use “my prompts and the responses” to improve its models
- No benchmarks: results “to follow in a technical report”
Source: PIB; AIKosh EKA-1-26B listing; Soket AI early-access and Project EKA pages · as of 5 November 2026
01What an open licence promises, and what it does not
Apache 2.0 grants anyone who has the work a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable” licence to copy, modify and distribute it, commercial use included.8 It governs what you may do with the weights once you hold them; it does not oblige the publisher to hand them to everyone. Open-weight models are usually posted for anyone to download, as Soket did with its 1.25bn-parameter Pragna-1B on Hugging Face in March 2024, under the same licence.7 For EKA-1, the licence settles the terms and the waitlist settles who gets in.
Dhīr shows the other half. ZenteiQ publishes section averages across 41 benchmarks against 24 open models, and its evaluation code, but says the models are “available through enterprise licensing and pilot programmes”.6 Dhīr 2B has 2.03bn parameters; Dhīr 5B is a mixture of experts with 5.09bn, 1.79bn active per token; both cover English and ten Indian languages and were trained on Google Cloud TPUs in Mumbai.6
02Where EKA-1 sits in the Mission's plan
The Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission on 7 March 2024 with an outlay of ₹10,371.92 crore.9 In March 2026 MeitY told the Lok Sabha it backs 12 organisations to build sovereign foundation models. Sarvam, BharatGen and Gnani had launched theirs at the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026, and the resulting models “are expected to contribute to the open-source ecosystem by making them available through AIKosh”.10
Soket’s commitment there is “India’s first open-source 120 billion parameter foundation model”, with support of ₹177.08 crore, ₹162.47 crore of it compute. ZenteiQ’s is BrahmAI, 8bn to 80bn parameters, with ₹206.49 crore.10 EKA-1 is “the first release from Project EKA”; Soket says a 120bn-plus model is in training on 1,536 H100 GPUs from the Mission.24
What to watch: the EKA-1 technical report and its benchmarks, whether the AIKosh listing opens to registered users without approval, and the 120bn model.
Sources
- PIB (MeitY), IndiaAI Mission released indigenous foundation models EKA-1 by Soket and Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B by ZenteiQ — 3 November 2026
- AIKosh, EKA-1-26B model listing — updated 2 November 2026
- Soket AI, Early access to EKA-1 — undated page
- Soket AI, Project EKA — undated page
- AIKosh, Dhir-5B and Dhir-2B model listings — updated 2 November and 30 October 2026
- ZenteiQ, Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B MoE — undated page
- Hugging Face, soketlabs/pragna-1b — published 3 March 2024
- Apache Software Foundation, Apache License, Version 2.0, section 2 — January 2004
- PIB, Cabinet approves ambitious IndiaAI Mission to strengthen the AI innovation ecosystem — 7 March 2024
- MeitY, Lok Sabha unstarred question 5417, Small Language Models, with Annexure I (copy hosted by MediaNama) — 25 March 2026
Disclosure. TechBag is a software reseller: it earns a margin when a reader buys through it, including from vendors named here. The analysis is TechBag’s own; no vendor paid for or saw this piece before publication. Facts are labelled reported, TechBag count or our view.
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